Russia promises legal action over NSA surveillance scandal

The scandal over illegal data interception by US security services questions the correlation between the US and international law, and senior Russian officials are calling for an urgent update in Russian legislation in response.

Russia will not ignore the actions of the US authorities who had
admitted leaks of personal data of Russian citizens to which the
US security services had access, the Foreign Ministry’s
plenipotentiary for human rights, Konstantin Dolgov, said at a
special meeting initiated by the Upper House of the Russian
parliament.

The move followed the revelations of former US security
contractor Edward Snowden, who made public the mass surveillance
and wire-tapping secretly committed by the National Security
Agency in what they claimed was part of the war on terror.

“The principle of observing the human rights is stated in all
UN Security Council resolutions on countering terrorism without
exceptions. There must be respect of the international law that
is no less important than the fight against terrorism. We must
analyze how the current American laws match the corresponding
international norms, we have a number of doubts on this
issue,” Dolgov said.

The Russian diplomat said that the US administration’s actions
should be checked for falling under the fourth amendment of the
US Constitution.

“The access to personal data by the US is being performed in a
seemingly civilized way, but in a very roundabout way, many Human
Rights groups have paid attention to this,” the
plenipotentiary noted.

A top official of the parliamentary majority party United Russia,
Lower House vice speaker Sergey Zheleznyak also urged a detailed
investigation into incidents in which US agencies collected
personal data of Russian citizens. The MP ridiculed the US
authorities for posing as a beacon of democracy while at the same
time conducting constant eavesdropping and surveillance on
millions of people, including citizens of the Russian Federation.

“Americans remind us for cutting short the propaganda of
sodomy among minors and at the same time they stick their noses
into personal correspondence of tens of millions of
citizens”, Zheleznyak said.

“More than that, they are not ashamed of wire-tapping the
heads of states who take part in international events,” he
added, apparently hinting at the recent disclosure that in 2009 the US security
services were intercepting the communications of then Russian
President Dmitry Medvedev, while he was on a visit to the UK.

Zheleznyak told the meeting that Russian laws should be urgently
amended with an obligation to store all information of official
bodies only on servers that physically are on the territory of
the Russian Federation. The MP said that the Lower House could
pass such bill, which he called “digital sovereignty”, in
its Fall session. Finally, the parliamentarian urged other
officials to give more support to Russia's own electronics
industry and software sector. “We should produce our own
electronic products instead of using someone else’s,”
Zheleznyak noted.

Upper House MP Ruslan Gattarov promised that a working group will
be set up before the end of the week to investigate the access of
US agencies to personal data of Russian internet users. Gattarov
suggested the group is comprised of representatives of the
Russian Communications Ministry and Russian consumer rights
watchdog Roskomnadzor as well as experts from leading Russian IT
companies, such as Kaspersky Lab.

The senator added that lawmakers would explore ways to allow the
investigation on an international level. “We cannot let this
issue sink into an abyss, as many people desire, we will not
allow the question to vanish without result”, he stressed.